Earth Knower, Manyard Dixon
“But what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.”
– A.O. Scott, in the article “Neo-Neo Realism“.
I think what I learn from studying the Tao is this appreciation of reality, the beauty of the everyday world. When you can enjoy your everyday life to the utmost, you don’t need the fantasy of wealth (you are already wealthy, really), the lure of working hard to achieve some unknown dream (you are already valuable, really), or the illusion of power and control (you can’t really control the universe anyway, only yourself and your reactions to everything). It doesn’t mean you don’t have plans and goals, but it means you become less attached to achieving some perfect illusory result, that those things don’t run your life, you live your life and may or may not achieve what you set out to do, and either way it is ok.
Being ok with the reality of your life is a really powerful thing. It means that other people can no longer manipulate you, that you won’t give in to those things that end up hurting you, that you and you alone are responsible for what happens to you to a very great extent. You no longer feel that what others do has to make you happy, and you lose that urge to do something, anything, to make yourself more happy. You just become happy without all the drama. And when you are unhappy, you realize it is because you are separate from the reality of the moment, pushing into future expectations or resenting past hurts or upsets. You learn to let go of that, and choose this. This moment, this place and time, this feeling, even. Then, you can deal with it, just as it is.
Escape to Reality.
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” — Albert Einstein
“Few people have the imagination for reality.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Everything you can imagine is real.” — Pablo Picasso
“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.” — Douglas H. Everett
“In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.”
— Henri Matisse
6 Responses
Being ok with the reality of your life is a really powerful thing.
Yes, indeed. What I always wonder, though, while I’m busy being okay with my reality, is how much of my “reality” is real and how much of it is entirely of my own creation and, therefore, malleable….
Good question, Mrs. Chili!
I’ve come to believe that perception of the reality is the reality, both whatever is actually happening and awareness of your most visceral response to it. Once you get to that point you can deal with what is really happening, with awareness fo how you feel about it and know what you are adding to the situation. It’s malleable to the extent that you know what your choices are, how what you’re feeling is adding to your own perceptions, and how you would like to influence what happens. Your mom’s awareness and acceptance of her situation, for instance, and her desire to make her final experiences pleasant ones rather than fearful ones. That shows a great deal of awareness.
And yes, gerry, I do believe in non-perceived existence, at least not humanly perceived. We are not, after all, the only life forms on the planet. I think trees themselves are very aware of their existence! I know hummingbirds are, and have had some unique interactions with them, as I do with my pets and other animals, and even feel with some plants…. not touchy-feely stuff, but just an awareness, and a feeling they are aware of me as well, especially trees. It’s not surprising the ancients considered them to have real souls. Life is an inter-connected web. Humans are part of it, certainly not central to it. Nature could exist quite well without us, perhaps even better…
I was thinking about “reality” yesterday, pondering the scientific view/truth that pretty much everything we see (or think we do) or otherwise experience with our senses is made up pretty much of nothing at all. All “matter” is pretty much an illusion.
We’ve all heard the rhetorical question, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make any sound?” Maybe we could revise that to, “If we come across a fallen tree in the forest was it ever, in our universe, a living tree standing up?” Phrased another way, did it ever have a non-perceived existence at all?
Donna,
What you’ve written really resonates with me and it’s a point I try to drive home again and again on my blog.
As I contemplated it a bit more though, I do realize that living in a quasi-free country shapes this perspective. If either of us lived in war-torn Iraq or Afghanistan or in a locale of grinding poverty and oppression, could we seriously say that “being ok with the reality of your life is a really powerful thing.”?
I don’t know the answer.
Ah, but does it exist as we perceive it, that’s the question. If by some chance a scientist could “translate” how a hummingbird sees a tree, would we recognize it as such?
Is the illusion we perceive the same as that perceived by the bird, or the tree itself?
Gerry, I think the answer is that it exists as we perceive it FOR US. My experience of something may be entirely different than that of the person (or animal, or tree or…) standing next to me. We have no choice, really, but to experience things through our own input ports; that’s all we’ve got available to us in this existence.
LOVE this conversation…